Fallen Crest Public

13





I had no idea what they did, but Mason smelled like smoke when he passed through our room to the bathroom. The shower turned on a second later. Getting out of bed and padding barefoot behind him, he was already under the spray when I got there. His clothes were in a pile on the floor so I put them into the laundry bin. Then I leaned against the counter, and our eyes met through the glass door. He didn’t smile or say hello. He stared at me, and I stared back as he continued bathing. Lifting his arms, the water cascaded over his shoulders and down his chest. I could see every inch of him, not that any of it was a surprise anymore, but the hunger was there. Always there.
He smirked, still watching me. I licked my lips.
The wait for him took forever. I was burning up by the time he turned the water off and stepped out. The towels were behind me and he reached past me, leaning into me at the same time. His chest touched mine and he paused. His arm was stretched behind me, but as I turned to meet his gaze, he was looking right at me. Just there. Within reach. I closed my eyes and inhaled when his breath coated my skin. It was a caress of its own. Then a throaty murmur escaped me, “Mason …”
He pulled away and dried himself off.
My eyelids opened, but I was caught and held by his gaze again.
My chest lifted as I inhaled another deep breath. My breasts grew heavy under my thin top. They wanted his touch. Without a bra, he could see their reaction. It took one more second as he finished drying off before he dropped the towel again and stepped close to me.
His hands found my hips.
My eyes closed. My head went down.
Home. Finally.
“Sam,” he murmured from an inch away. His lips were there, right there for me to taste.
“What?” I could barely talk.
“She won’t hurt you.” His hand lifted.
When it touched my neck, my heart jumped into my throat, and my blood began pumping.
He moved it around my neck and cupped the back of my head. I was held, anchored in his hand. It was strong, so sure. My heart was racing now and my chest was heaving up and down. I was struggling to breathe. The knot in me started to loosen. It always did when he made me feel like this. Safe. Then a lump formed in my throat, and I had to bite down on my lip. I would either become a sobbing mess or I’d throw myself at him. I wasn’t sure which one I wanted.
He decided for me.
Mason pulled me into his chest. His arms wrapped around me, and I felt his head bend down. He rested his forehead on my shoulder, so I did the same. My hands lifted to his hips, but then with a sob, I wrapped them around his waist.
I’d been so damn worried.
He was safe. They were both safe. My heart kept pounding as the relief washed over me, replacing the desire from moments ago.
Then I peeled myself from him, just enough so I could get answers. “What did you guys do?”
“Nothing bad.”
“Mason.”
He flashed me a grin, took my hand in his and led me to the bedroom. I checked the door and saw it was locked, but then he bent down and lifted me in his arms. I was upright in his arms as he walked us the remaining few steps to the bed. He placed me onto it so that I remained standing while his hands kept me upright. They gripped my hips, and he tipped his head back. A soft smile gracing his features.
My hand lifted on its own volition and went through his wet hair. He closed his eyes, and I could tell he savored the small caress. My fingers grabbed a fistful of his hair and I pulled with enough force so he’d open them. When he did, I asked again, “What did you guys do?”
A slow grin appeared, and his arms tightened around my legs. That was all the warning I got before he flipped me in the air and caught me again. One hand cradled between my shoulders, and the other gripped my ass. He lowered me to the bed and then climbed on top of me in one fluid movement. It was as if he didn’t even move and he was above me, holding himself up with his arms and legs.
His eyes roamed over me as he answered, “We went to Kate’s.” He dropped a small kiss on my throat. “Everything was still there, so we took it.” Another kiss an inch higher. “Then I stuck around and watched the fireworks.” The hand on my hip slid around my waist.
My heart started pounding again, and I held my breath.
The hand moved down and pushed underneath my shorts. There was no restriction. They were made of soft fabric and clung to me. As his fingers moved even further down, he slid two fingers deep into me. He moved further up until he was directly above me. His lips were so close to mine again. Watching mine, he murmured, “Kate almost spilled her plans, but her friends were too stupid to let her.”
“And then?”
His fingers began moving. Oh god. He pressed another kiss to the underside of my chin.
My heart spiked, and a burst of pleasure rushed over me. I was tempted to say, “To hell with the questioning” and pull him down to me, but I couldn’t. This was important. “And then?” I asked again, almost panting now.
“And then.” His other hand moved to hold mine. Our fingers slid against each other as he linked our hands together. Then he lowered his body slowly, inch by inch, until he was resting on top of me. He fit between my legs, in just the right spot as his fingers kept thrusting in and out.
I bit my lip, trying to stop myself from moving down. My lips fell open and I gasped, but I kept it silent. I had to. My heart was beating so loud now. “Mason,” I groaned, “just tell me.”
“Tell you?”
“You like torturing me.”
A corner of his mouth curved up. The grin was cruel, but his eyes hadn’t moved from my lips. “Maybe.” They had already darkened, but they grew black now. “Maybe you torture me, too.”
I was ready to start praying for patience. “You’re beginning to piss me off.”
“Am I?” He moved his hips into me in rhythm with his fingers.
I gasped out loud. Lust and pleasure were rolling through me like a riptide on repeat, over and over again. My hands found their way to his shoulders, and my fingers dug in. Then he moved again. I was pushed further away from consciousness. Desire for him was making me blind. I lifted my heavy eyelids and looked at him. His gaze was transfixed on my lips, and he licked his own, thrusting against me at the same time.
“Mason,” I whimpered.
I felt his silent laughter; his chest tightened and jerked before he pulled away, still grinning, but it had softened on the corners. His eyes caught mine and held them. They narrowed, and I caught a spark in them, one that I recognized. He was thinking.
“Mason, tell me.”
“They’re planning something, said it was supposed to be for next week, but it’s going to happen at the end of this week instead.”
The heat from my desire lessened. It made room for a chill. “What do you think it is?”
“Honestly?” He pulled his fingers out.
I nodded, a lump was in my throat now.
“I think they’re going to hurt you. Physically.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?” He frowned and lifted his thumb to my mouth. He rubbed it over my lips, tugging the bottom down before his hand fell away. “You’re not surprised?”
I shrugged. “Not really. I mean, that’s expected. Kate’s never struck me as the real smart type.”
“Well, she is.” The lust in his eyes moved to caution. He warned me, “You have no idea what she can do. Beating you up isn’t good, but I’d be a lot less worried if I thought that’s all she was going to do.”
“She’s been texting Heather a bunch.”
His body stiffened on top of me. “Saying what?”
“She needs to stop being my friend. Heather said there were threats to her and to her family, too.”
“When did this start?”
“The first day of school. She came over and made a big show about warning Heather away. That was when Tate tried to intervene.”
“Against you?”
“No, against Kate. She told her that going up against you isn’t worth it.” I frowned. The sexual intensity was gone, and he seemed deep in thought. I reached for him, curving my hand over his shoulder to his jaw. His gaze had moved past my shoulder, but I touched his jaw. “Hey. What are you thinking?”
“That I’m starting to figure out what else Kate is doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“With Tate.”
“What?”
He was off the bed in a flash and pulled on his sweatpants. The bed had only settled when he disappeared through the door and hollered, “Logan!”
“What’s up?”
Grabbing one of Mason’s sweatshirts, I pulled it over my head and ignored how it covered my pajama shorts. It looked like I wasn’t wearing anything underneath it.
Logan smirked at me as I came to the doorway. “You cold, Sam?”
“Shut it, Logan.”
Mason asked, “Where are you going?”
Logan had showered. He was dressed in jeans and his athletic sweatshirt. Playing with his car keys in his hand, he shrugged. “Was going to head out for a few. What’s up?”
“You going to Tate’s?”
His question threw both of us. There it was again, the lie Mason never explained to me. Narrowing my eyes at him, I studied Logan at the same time. He seemed cautious now and slid his hands into his front pockets. “Maybe. Why?”
“Kate mentioned a camcorder,” Mason said. “And before that Natalie had her brother’s camcorder. They were going to use it to take pictures of the mannequin.”
“So? They have a camcorder. So do we.”
“Kate said they were heading to Tate’s at the end. Sam just told me they’ve been sending threats to Heather. They want her to stop being her friend and Tate tried to warn them off.”
Logan nodded. “She told me about that. Said it was a lost cause. Kate’s gone off the deep end.”
“So,” Mason paused and watched him. He was waiting …
“So what?”
“Logan, I spelled it out for you.”
“Threats to Heather. Camcorder. Tate thinks Kate’s crazy. None of this is really new here, brother.”
I sighed. Even I knew what Mason was implying. Logan wasn’t dumb. If he wasn’t figuring it out that meant something else was going on with him. Moving to the couch, I perched on the end and said, “I think he’s saying that Kate might think Tate’s on our side.”
“She is,” Logan snorted. “No way would she go against you. She knows what we’d do to her.”
“Logan,” Mason groaned.
I lifted a hand to his arm and felt his tension. My hand began to rub. “Do you think Kate would take a camcorder to Tate’s out of the goodness of her heart?”
“Wha—oh shit. No. No way. You think?”
“Are you going over there?”
Logan glanced at his brother again. A resigned look came over him. “Yeah, I am. What do you want me to do?”
“Don’t say anything or make it obvious, but look to see if there’s a camcorder stashed somewhere.”
“Wait,” Logan shook his head. “You think she’s in on it? We do things or we have done things in the living room. They could’ve put it there—”
“They were going there tonight.”
“Oh.” His shoulders dropped. “So what do you want me to do? You want me to grab it?”
When Mason didn’t reply, Logan looked to me. I shrugged. “Mason’s the mastermind. Not me.”
“Mase?”
“I don’t know. Maybe leave it in place?”
“I’m not going over there anymore. No f*cking way, not if they have a camcorder in there. That’s messed up.”
“I know. I’m not saying that,” Mason bit out. “But if we move the camcorder, then they’d have to change tactics again. We know what they’re planning right now. Maybe we can wait to see what else she’s planning?”
“Should I tell Tate?”
Mason didn’t respond.
“Mase, that’s not right.”
“No,” he sighed. “I know. Yeah, tell her, but she needs to act like she doesn’t know it’s there. We’ll figure out the next step later.”
“What about her parents?” I asked. “Should they know? They might talk about things that are personal.”
Logan shook his head. “Nah. She’s not here with them. Her dad lost his job so they shipped her out here to live with her older sister, but she’s gone on a modeling trip. Tate said she wouldn’t be back for a week or so.” Then he jerked his head in a nod and started for the door. “Oh wait,” he braked and gestured to me. “Did you tell her about the mannequins?”
“Not yet.”
“Mannequins?”
“Yeah.” He flashed me a smile as he headed out the door. “We torched ‘em, all of ‘em. Natalie’s aunt’s going to get a nice little surprise when she goes to work in the morning. On that note, I’m out.” The door shut behind him, but we could hear him whistling as he went down the hall.
“You burned them?”
He nodded.
“All of them?”
He narrowed his eyes, and I got a glimpse of the cruel Mason again. “Every single one of them.”
“Was that safe?”
He shrugged, turning to me with a hand on my leg. He nudged it over and stepped between them as he looked down at me. “We were safe. We took all of them to a place where it’d be okay.”
“And Natalie’s aunt? She won’t press charges?”
“We left a note with a few images I kept from when they messed with Marissa. We let her know she could thank her niece for all of it.”
I held my breath. It’d been so long since he’d mentioned Marissa, and now that he had, I wanted to ask him more about her. I wanted to understand what had happened to her, but I sensed his unease. It was like approaching a wild animal. I had to go slow and with caution. My heart started to pound again as I took that first step. My hand raised to touch his arm. The muscles were corded tightly in a bunch. He was so tense, but I had to try. “You still had those pictures?”
His arm began to tremble underneath my touch, just a tiny bit, but it was enough to take my breath away. His voice was rough when he spoke, “Did you know they did the same to her?”
The lump was back in my throat. It was big and wobbly, but I nodded. “Yes.”
“Heather told you?”
“Yes.” My heart was racing so fast now. He was finally talking about her. I felt the wall coming down. I needed to know so much. She was important to him. I needed to understand. “Will you tell me about her?”
“I thought I had?”
“More. You didn’t say much before. She transferred because of Kate and her friends?”
He let out a deep sigh and moved away. I ached, I still needed his touch, but then he surprised me. He came back, a conflicted look on his face, and lifted me from the couch. I was curled against his chest as he sat down on the couch, with me on his lap. Then he tucked his chin over my head and began to talk about her.
“It was Tate, too,” he paused for a moment, “towards the end of her relationship with Logan, and before she tried to sleep with me, when Heather had stopped being friends with her. I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t care about your friend back then, but I remember Logan saying something about it to me. He seemed to care, but then I started noticing that Tate was becoming friendly with Kate and the girls. Made sense. Tate was always around Logan and the girls were always around us. The guys considered them friends, you know?”
“Where’d your friendship with Marissa come in?”
His arms tightened around me, securing me in place. “That was a fluke thing. We sat next to each other in a class and got paired up for a project. My parents were going through a divorce at the time. My dad had been cheating for so many years, and I watched my mom go through that shit storm, then your mom started popping up. Anyways, I had a pretty low opinion of the female gender from Tate and other girls. I didn’t even like Kate and the rest of them. Kate must’ve thought she was my maybe-girlfriend, I don’t know what she thought, but I didn’t care. I used her so I can kind of see where she got it wrong, but I didn’t trust her or any of the others. They were mean.”
I hid a smile.
He must’ve sensed it because he said, “I know. I’m not the nicest person, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to choose people like that to trust. I don’t trust anyone except you and Logan.”
“You began to trust Marissa?”
“Yeah. We’d talk. That’s it. We didn’t hang out or anything. I think I sat at her table a few times for lunch. That seemed like a big deal to everyone, but whatever. I didn’t want to deal with the bullshit from the girls. They’re hard to handle sometimes. Logan understood. Just dealing with the divorce and the fights at home, I didn’t want to deal with hearing shit at school, too. Marissa was nice. Her friends were quiet, but they didn’t seem to mind me when I sat with them. Looking back, I think that’s what put a target on her. It was after that when I began hearing things.”
My fingers curled into his, interlocking our hands together. “Marissa never told you?”
“No, she never did, but I started noticing things. She lost weight. She looked tired all the time. I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough. She wasn’t my girlfriend. I didn’t care that much; she was just nice to talk to at times. That was it.”
I heard the struggle in him. He didn’t quite understand. “You trusted her.” It was beginning to make sense. “You never trusted those other girls. You tolerated them. They must’ve seen it.” And hated it. The pieces were coming together. They had destroyed Marissa because he enjoyed her company. If they did that to her, what were they going to do to me? A shudder went through me at the thought. I was much more than a friend. I was beginning to realize he had no idea what they had done to her. Guys weren’t told when girls tormented other girls. It was an unspoken rule, one that I had broken. I gulped now. Would it be worse because I brought them in? But no. That wasn’t the right thought. They would win if I started to think like that. Heather was right, it was time for me to fight back.
“Yeah, maybe.” His chest lifted and lowered as he took in a deep breath. “I’m sure I don’t even know half the shit they did to her, but I knew about the mannequins. It wasn’t Marissa, but it looked just like her. The pictures were all over. People laughed at them, and it was like they were laughing at her.”
“What happened after that?”
He started to lift his shoulder in a shrug, but dropped it. “More,” he bit off the end of his word. His hold on me tightened, as if trying to guard me from it, too. “I heard little things they did, like breaking the lock on her locker. She used to ride the bus to school, and I’m sure things must’ve happened there, too. Towards the end, her parents drove her.” His hand had a cement hold on my arm now. “You don’t understand. Kate and the girls had a lot of power over all the other girls back then. They don’t anymore. When they were exiled from the guys, I knew that would fracture the power they had over the rest. I see it too. The other girls aren’t doing what Kate wants. They’re starting to go against Kate and her friends.”
He was holding me so tightly. When a slight tremor went through him, I knew he wanted to protect me. Turning my head to the side, I looked at him. His eyes were closed and his eyebrows were bunched forward, strained together. Then he said further, “I didn’t stop them and I should have. I’m not a bully, Sam. I don’t pick on the weak or try to make someone’s life hell, but if they come after me or someone I love, then I’ll go after them with everything I’ve got. I’ll use all of their weaknesses to destroy them, but I never start the fight.”
He didn’t start the fight, but he finished it. I understood what he was saying. “Mason.”
His eyelids lifted and the regret in them took my breath away. Then I swallowed over the lump in my throat and spoke, “She didn’t tell you what was happening. She wasn’t your girlfriend. Your parents were getting a divorce. You can’t blame yourself for not stopping Kate. I’m betting that you didn’t even know half of what they did.”
“That’s the problem,” he bit out. His eyes growing cold. “I should’ve. She was my friend. She was a good person, and I didn’t fight for her like I should’ve. What they did to her is on me. I didn’t stop them when I could’ve. No one else could’ve, so it was my place to do it. I didn’t. A part of me checked out, Sam. You’re right. All the crap from the divorce. It went on long after Logan dumped Tate, too. She made it worse. Thinking back, it was how Tate hurt me back, through Marissa, but she stopped talking to me at the end. She had the teacher assign her to someone else and she stopped even saying hi to me. It was like we were strangers.”
“Did it stop then?”
“No.”
That one word came out like an ache. He was haunted by it.
I waited for him to continue, and he did, “I was grateful when she left. It stopped. She was safe.”
“You started talking again after she left?”
He nodded. “She emailed me, told me that she didn’t blame me for what happened. I was such an ass. I didn’t even comment on it. I still have never said a word about it to her.”
I didn’t know what to say so I moved until I was straddling him. He fell back against the couch. His hands went to my legs, where mine rested on top of them, and he watched me from underneath heavy eyelids. His jaw clenched and some of his old wall came back in place. He was always so guarded.
He shook his head and cursed under his breath. His hands turned to lock with mine. “When she came to Nate’s cabin, it’s why I wanted him with her at all times. Plus, you were there, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
“Has she emailed you since then?”
“A few times. I haven’t responded. That wasn’t intentional, I’ve just been wrapped up with you and everything going on with your mom.”
I saw the struggle in him. He was the unbeatable one, the ruthless one, and that broke me. I would protect him how he protected me. Lifting a hand to his face, I cupped his cheek and leaned forward to press my lips to his. It was a soft graze, but my heart fluttered. The ache started between my legs, and I moved closer, grinding on him. Then I moved back, just enough to whisper, “We’ll make it different this time.” My lips brushed against his. “We’ll change things this time. We’ll make it count.”
His reaction was instant. His hands caught my face and his lips opened over mine. His hunger had been unleashed, and it was demanding more. He stood with my legs wrapped around his waist and took us to bed. A primal need started in me as I met his ghosts that night, and as he thrust into me, that need took over. The need to protect him was more than before. I had worried before, knowing I could lose him, but now it went beyond that. He hadn’t stopped Kate from hurting his friend and it still hurt him, but now I was angry that they had even put him in that spot. It should’ve never happened in the first place, but that was on Kate. She was going to pay for what she had done.